Do you think Mike Maddux should get any blame?

[DannoMac21]

Our pitching has been God-awful lately. Do you think Maddux should be receiving some of the blame here?

[homer]

I think Ennder has pointed out that most of the starting rotation is doing about the same as they've always done but the defense has been terrible behind them. Suppan in particular has been a little better than career norms. Bullpen....who knows for some of them since there isn't really a track record for Villy and Parra. I'd lay blame first on the D and Ned's handling of the bullpen (which is questionable at times but probably not as big a reason for failure as some might think) before I'd blame Maddux.

[Ennder]

I would doubt Maddux can help a pitcher with more than their FIP. Best he can do is make them throw strikes, not give up a lot of HR's and not walk a lot of guys and try to keep the ball on the ground. The team is fine in FIP. Whatever you want to believe is the problem with the team's ERA is most likely out of the pitching coaches control if not the pitchers control.

[HebrewHammer]

Our defense is so incredibly bad it's hard to fathom it. It would be one thing if only a certain stat or 2 was out of wack but it seems like every indicator is pointing to our incredibly rancid defense.

 

Nearly every pitcher is going in there and runs are being scored. The one constant is the defense. This team plays terrible, terrible defense. They give the other team 4 or more outs so often. And in MLB you're going to pay dearly when you give up extra outs, especially since those extra outs mean guys are on base!

[pitchleague]

the thing is, we weren't really complaining all that much about our defense back in late June-early July when we were still up 8 games in the division. Was it good back then and we've just suddenly become the Bad News Bears? Or did we all see this was coming?

[Ennder]

We knew the defense was going to be bad before the season even started. We have two of the worst defensive players in the NL in our IF with Braun and Weeks and Fielder is below average. I have some hope that Braun grows into a better 3B, Fielder has improved and maybe he can take one more step and become average. Weeks is hopeless in my opinion, he isn't making the easy errors anymore but his range is just horrible and it seems its more from getting bad reads off the bat which he shouldn't still be doing after this long at 2B.

 

I'm sure part of the recent pitching problems is just bad luck too, for the past month it seems like every night the other team gets 3 or 4 little dink singles or balls bouncing off one of our players etc. Singles are extremely luck driven and its very easy to get bad luck over 100-200 IP with them, it takes a pretty big sample to even them out.